


Out of the bone white afternoon

by lorax



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 15:19:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/lorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"She was a dancer when she met Clint Barton."</i>  Clint Barton saved Natasha's life once.  She tries to return the favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the bone white afternoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [russian_blue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/gifts).



> Written for the [Not Ready for Prime Time](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/notprimetime2012/profile) challenge. Title taken from Richard Siken's [Wishbone](http://poetry.dreamwidth.org/195070.html). Thank you to [musesfool](http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/) and [st_aurafina](http://st-aurafina.dreamwidth.org/) for beta reading and wrangling my wild commas. Remaining mistakes are most definitely my own. The character death warned for is canon, but as it gets a mention, I played it safe and added it to the warnings.

  
**Out of the bone white afternoon**  
 _“This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,_  
and make a wish."  
\-- Richard Siken, "Wishbone"  


She was a dancer when she met Clint Barton.

It was one of dozens of cover IDs, and the third time she'd been a dancer. It had been ballet the first time, and a stripper the second. This time, she spoke garbled English with a heavy French accent, and she wanted nothing more than to dance on Broadway, under the bright lights. She was on the arm of an American arms dealer operating out of Iran and buying from Guatemalans. They spoke Spanish while she fitted herself against his side, looking nervous and blank and smiling at a joke she wasn't supposed to know was at her expense.

She knew how to dance _Giselle_ , how to twine around a pole, and how to dance the opening number from _Chicago_. She'd been meant to forget the first two, but she was years away from the Red Room and older than any Widow had ever gotten to be. Natalia remembered more with every mission. She remembered the way they'd stripped out her memories, how they'd taken away everything she was and made her anew, and then broke her down to her foundation, over and over. She remembered bullet holes that didn't scar, and broken bones that healed without a trace. She'd worked through the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of a war and the start of more, and she hadn't known.

Now she was a French dancer, and her head ached, and she wanted to put a bullet in her date because those were her orders, and she wanted to put a bullet in her handler, which wasn't.

Her American put his hand on her ass and guided her out of the room while his contacts jeered behind her. On the deserted terrace, he pushed her back against the railing as his hulking guards stationed themselves by the doorway, looking politely away. Natalia slid her hand down his side and then slipped it into the high slit of her skirt, drawing the gun there.

Two shots and the guards were down without a word. The arms dealer was babbling in English, backing away with lifted arms, but she saw the way his hands were dropping with each step, about to make a grab for his belt. She aimed, finger on the trigger. Her head pulsed and everything was pointless. He deserved to die, but Natalia didn't know who she was killing for anymore, or who she was supposed to be when it was done, and the gun was down.

Something metallic and sleek hit the gun, knocking it out of her hand. Her hand smarted from the jarring impact, but was unhurt. She whirled as another shot hit imbedded itself in her target's arm, dropping him quickly enough that there had to be a sedative strong enough for a horse on the arrow. _Arrow_ , her mind registered, as she turned to face the source. There was only one operative who worked with arrows. She found him a moment later, perched in a tree with an arrow sighted on her. He was too far away for her to reach him before he shot and her lone gun had skittered out of her grasp.

She should have known he was there long before the arrow hit, and she hadn't. It was a slip, and the feel of a mistake was more foreign than any of the languages she spoke, or places she wasn't meant to remember having been. Natalia was trained for this, mistaken or no. She could have dodged and rolled and evaded, but she stared down the arrow and held her ground. 

Hawkeye ( _American operative, affiliation unknown, two previous long-distance encounters while under alternate identities_ )held the arrow steady. "I thought you were a real estate agent," he said. ( _Janet Durma, born in New England and struggling to sell her first house after her husband left her with bills to pay and a two year old to feed._ She'd worked in the same building as her target and slipped upstairs while he met with his advisors, put a bullet in his brain after showing a nervous newlywed couple a split-level in the suburbs. Natalia remembered creating the details of Janet's life, the little details always the only part of her covers she chose for herself. Janet had dyed her hair too-blonde and bitten her nails while she tried to negotiate with sellers. She hadn't liked dogs. She didn't wear pink.) His voice was pitched only just loud enough for her to hear, not enough to carry past the balcony they occupied.

She shrugged. "I thought you were in Pakistan." She switched to French. "Americans are protecting arms dealers, now?"

He answered in English. "Just this one. He's got some dirty secrets we need to know, first." The arrow was aimed straight for her heart. Her dress was cut nearly to her navel, and she couldn't hide a vest. If the arrow hit, she would be dead. She knew who he was. He didn't miss a shot, just as she never failed to terminate a target. They were specialists.

Natalia shut her eyes, lifted her chin. _"Just do it,"_ she said, in Russian. Her covers hadn't been Russian in ten years. She'd missed the sound of it.

The shot didn't come. "I could help you," he said instead.

_"I did not ask for help."_

"I know. But I know who you are." 

She opened her eyes, staring him down. He was a killer, just as she was. He knew her from a file, from a trail of bodies, from the rumors of The Black Widow who had once been many and was now just her, the last Widow standing. He couldn't know her. She didn't even know herself, except for the bones of her that they built their lies on, each time. 

He smiled slightly, lopsided and wry. "I have the crib sheet, at least," he amended, as if he knew what she was thinking. "I know they think you don't remember, but I can tell you do. They'll take you back, you'll have broken your perfect kill record, and the next target might not be a guy who deserves it. What do you have to lose by switching teams?"

"I don't work for a team," Natalia said, through her teeth.

"Yeah. I get that. I didn't used to, either. Turns out I'm better at it than I thought I would be. And you're a better operative than I am. I'm betting you'd adjust, too."

Natalia stared at him. "Why would you help me?"

Hawkeye shrugged, lowering the arrow. "I've got a soft spot for pretty blondes."

"I'm not really blonde."

"I know." His arrow was lowered, her gun was feet away. Natalia could reach it and get a shot off, probably. She picked it up slowly instead, and he let her. "My retrieval team will be up here in thirty seconds. Come on." He could have killed her and didn't. She had a gun and a clear shot, she could kill him and she didn't. She rolled up her skirt, tying it around her waist and following him as he made for the fenceline, climbing down the low terrace and keeping to the treeline. He threw her a wide grin, but kept her even with him, not tempting her with another shot at his back. She hadn't thought to take one anyway. "So what should I call you? Widow doesn't have the most personal ring to it."

Her name, her real name, rose to her lips. "Romanoff," she said, and it rang strangely in her head, too-stark and too-true, but somehow a relief to say aloud. It was closer than she'd told anyone since she was a child and being trained to have no name aside from what they gave to her. "Natasha," she added. True enough to ring with it, but far enough that it didn't leave her skin crawling from too much offered truth. 

He gave her a long look as they froze to wait for a guard patrol to pass. If he knew it wasn't quite true, he said nothing. "Barton. Clint," he said. He offered her a hand. Tucked beneath her opera gloves was a thin bladed knife. It could slip beneath his ribs and he'd be dead before he realized it. He stared steadily into her eyes. She shook his hand. They ran together to where a black helicopter and a man with thinning hair waited for him. If he was surprised to see Natalia ( _Natasha, now_ ), he didn't show it. 

She shut her eyes for just a second as the rotors beat and lifted them from the ground. The ache in her head lightened, just a little. Beside her Hawkeye sat close, but didn't touch, and he didn't try to take her gun. When the helicopter touched down a ways away from where they stood, he stood beside her, and it felt more like solidarity than watchfulness. "Do you even like to dance, Natasha?" he asked, while the agent he'd called _Coulson_ stepped away, giving them space as he spoke into a phone.

"I don't know," she said, and then thought of the music, and the feeling of moving her body for something that didn't end in blood and lies. "I think so."

He smiled. She fell silent and memorized faces and names and exits and the nearest weapons. But she stayed beside him, and she trusted him, for now. He could have killed her. He hadn't. It meant something.  
***

Clint was tied down a room away, and she didn't know if his eyes would still be too-blue when they opened again. They had reminded her of a lake she'd seen, when she was just a girl and had wanted nothing more than to run out onto the frozen water and skate, not knowing that the clear color meant the ice was too thin and would drop away beneath her. If Natasha had been alone, she would have laid her head on the table and shut her eyes to center her world and block out the harsh sound of Clint's breathing. The steady sound was amplified by the interrogation room's speakers and made inescapable without being comforting. Fury stood over her shoulder, and the men Natasha allowed to see beneath her surface to where her cracks showed through were few, and Fury wasn't among them, so she stayed straight-backed and stoic.

"There might be nothing we can do until Loki's controlled, Agent," Fury said, words bitten off with a quiet, tense anger that spoke as many volumes as Natasha's steely determination did, to those that knew him.

"There is," Natasha answered, because there had to be. She scrolled through the information on the tablet in front of her. _Agent Barton, Clinton; Codename: Hawkeye. Status Compromised_ it read across the top. A history of Clint's assignments, his little triumphs and failures sprawled out below the red text, handwritten notes from Phil documenting them, tempering them. Where her name first appeared, it was written up as _Agent Barton took opportunity to acquire valuable asset for future alliance_ , instead of off-mission and risking his reputation and life for a woman he didn't know as anything but a killer.

"Just don't let him loose until you're sure." Fury shifted, and Natasha felt his hand hover over her shoulder. She tensed, but didn't move away. The touch never fell, and a moment later she was alone, Clint's breath catching, on the verge of waking but not quite there. 

Natasha knew how Clint took his coffee, what make of gun he preferred when he couldn't notch an arrow, which Rat Pack movie he liked best, and how salt sweat tasted on his skin - but it wasn't enough. Natasha knew all the nows of Barton's life, and all the stray moments they'd shared, but there were details they never spoke of. She didn't know his brother's name, nor the shape of the street he'd lived on growing up. She didn't know how old he'd been when he first killed someone. She didn't know if he'd ever been in love.

Natasha knew Clint, but she didn't know the pieces to pick out and put together to assemble the man he used to be, to see where the thing Loki turned him into was thinnest and she could chip through to the man beneath. She knew all of Clint's weakest points, but Loki had learned them too, and he'd have shored them up so high she could never climb past. If he woke up Loki's, Natasha didn't know how to make him hers again when she'd never really claimed him to begin with. 

It had been her call more than Clint's, keeping secrets and pasts as far in their history as they could. Things they didn't know could never be tortured out of them. And Barton knew so much about her. He knew about the Red Room, about what she'd been and why she couldn't ever be that again. (The details she hugged close--they still came hazy, but the picture of how she'd been made, Clint knew, just not the brushstrokes that had gotten her there.) He'd learned her long before he met her. Half of what she knew herself to be, she'd learned again because Clint had already assumed that was who she was, and Natasha adapted well to expectations. She hadn't asked to know the same things about him. If she had asked, Clint would have told her, and then it would be something soft and shared - a mutual accounting of miserable histories and great washes of red left behind them.

Natasha had liked owing him for his silence, because she was accountable to no one anymore, save those she chose to be. It had felt like gratitude to her, leaving a debt that could have been paid. It was the easiest thank you Natasha knew how to find. But now here they were, limping along in the sky on a countdown to the end of the world, and she didn't know what to say that could toss a rope into the water and let Clint climb back to shore if he was lost beneath the ice.

"Tasha," Clint's voice startled her. She hadn't heard the moment when unconscious breathing shifted to the lighter pattern of wakefulness. It wasn't like her to miss details like that. Natasha stood, walking to the door. The table he was strapped to faced away, and he couldn't see her face in the small window. From here, she couldn't see his, either, just the top of his head, the stretch of strapped down limbs. But Natasha could hear it in his voice, the groggy sluggish slur that came with concussion, could see the way his fingers flexed, testing the straps that bound him.

Taut muscles eased after a moment, and his fingers stilled. Somehow, even held in place by unforgiving straps, Natasha saw the slump of defeat as it sagged through him. 

"I always said you were better than me," he said, trailing off the words as he drifted back on the edge of unconsciousness. "'m sorry."

Natasha touched fingers to the window, glanced back toward the files and the door Fury had left through. From the control panel, she shut down the audio that was recording and projecting every sound. She opened the door and stepped inside with Clint, the sound of it bringing him fully awake as she stood over him. 

"Clint, you're gonna be all right," she said. She didn't know if it was true, but his eyes weren't the glowing blue of a stranger. She took a chance, stepped onto the ice, and reached for the straps.  
***

Clint's idea of a vacation was somewhere quiet and full of trees, set atop a mountain where you could stand on a porch and see for miles and no one would ever be able to see you before you spotted them. Natasha had no concept of vacation. All her holidays had been working ones, and in quieter moments, she'd told Clint of Christmases in Moscow, or New Year's in Paris, when she'd slipped her leash for a few days before they brought her back and made her someone new. They had just been moments, though, not whole days or weeks. Freedom was stifling.

Neither of them knew what to do with the paid leave they were given after New York. The so-called Avengers scattered, but the city had been full of frightened people with smartphones. Clint was in the footage the least, and Natasha only a little more - most of the cameras had focused on the Hulk, as he crashed through the city, or Iron Man who still took a second to flash a peace sign as he buzzed away toward an enemy. But Natasha hadn't been invisible, and that knowledge itched under her skin. She was a spy with a face the world now knew. It didn't take away the rest of what she was, but it left her in a place she'd never been. When people knew her, it was because she wanted them to. This was out of her control.

Stark took to the press, and for once she was grateful for his fame whoring, because the more the world remembered Iron Man, and Captain America, the sooner it would forget the woman who had stood with them. But with no assignments coming and a city that knew them sprawling out around them, repairing itself, Clint and Natasha felt trapped.

She had never had to choose where to go; she was always sent. Natasha itched to leave the city, but there was funeral after funeral. They held memorials and quiet ceremonies for Agents who had fallen, and no one could say they'd died in a helicarrier hundreds of miles away, so they were added in to the death tallies of New York. Clint went to every one. Natasha went with him because it seemed kinder than letting him go alone.

In another place and time, she would have told him that self-flagellation didn't help anyone. Self-pity was a luxury and Natasha had never been able to afford it. But when Clint stood in lines of black-clad mourners, and the survivors parted around him like he might turn on them at any moment, Natasha wasn't sure that he didn't need to see their distrust, and face it before he could go back to the life he'd led. It wasn't until the sixth funeral that she knew there was no going back to the same life, it was too much changed.

Coulson's funeral was the sixth, and Natasha realized as she watched him lowered into the earth that if he had been alive, she and Clint would never have been left at loose ends. He would have found a place for them to be, and without that they were both just waiting. Years of pulling them out of ops and sending them back in, and Phil had known when they needed to work alone, and when they should be together. He'd known how to give them enough freedom to do their jobs and use their skills, but boundaries enough that they didn't feel as if they were cast out without a touchstone. Coulson was the common link, the outside force that she and Barton had both trusted as much as they'd learned to trust one another.

When he disappeared from view, Natasha slipped her hand into Clint's. He gripped tight, and didn't let go, as if he'd been waiting for her to offer a lifeline she hadn't known he needed. (She'd known. She just hadn't realized she was the only one left who could offer it.)

There were four more funerals in the three days to come. The night they buried Phil, Clint woke up in the bed beside hers, and she heard the choked off sound of his breath. To her, it was as loud as any scream and just as desperate.

She slipped from beneath the covers to sit on the edge of his bed, knee bent and one foot pressed flat to the floor as she slid her hand back into his. Clint's eyes were bloodshot and there was a nick on his cheek from where he'd shaved with shaking hands. From a man whose aim never wavered and whose hands were always steady, it was as obvious a sign of damage as the glowing circle in Stark's chest. 

"It was so easy, Tasha," he said, not looking at her. She studied the bruises that painted his shoulders and back in shades of blue and green lined with the healing muddy red of scratches from broken glass. Her skin had already healed, her wounds gone. She felt ostentatiously unbroken when he still wore his damage, and hers had never shown at all even when it was all she felt she was. "I didn't question, I didn't wonder. I did what I was told, and it was so _simple_. So pure. I hate what I did, but when I wake up, for just a second I remember what I've done, and then I _miss_ how easy it was while I did it. I miss being nothing but a killer on command because nothing mattered but doing what he told me to do."

Clint turned to look at her finally, and his eyes gave too much away. Natasha didn't know if she could ever strip herself down enough to lay her eyes that bare, and it made her uneasy to look at it. "I couldn't kill you when they sent me to, the first time. One touch from an alien freak and I didn't even think twice about trying. What does it say about me when I miss that kind of clarity?"

Natasha traced a circle onto the back of his hand. "It's always easier when you don't care about anything but the target, and the mission."

His eyes searched her face, and Natasha softened her mouth, tilted her head and let her lashes lower just a little - giving him regret and recrimination to look at. 

Clint's mouth tightened and he looked away again. "Don't," he said. 

She knew what he meant, but even years later and desperate to help him, Natasha couldn't just let go of the facade, and Clint couldn't pretend he didn't know that she wasn't giving him the whole truth, just the parts she knew he wanted to see. 

"Tasha. . ."

Whatever he'd been about to say trailed off and Natasha felt like he was slipping away from her. She moved, sudden and with a hint of violence, catching both his hands in hers and straddling his hips, seeing the wince that came with moving too fast to try to keep up with her and failing, because he was tired and worn and she was neither. She leaned in, kissing him slow and too hard, artless and abrupt. It was the most truth she could give him.

He kissed back, joined hands dropping to her thighs. When it broke, Clint leaned his head against her chest and she lifted one arm to cradle it. 

"We're going dancing," she said. He laughed like it hurt, and when he wound down she laid him out on the bed and curled against his side, watching him as he slept and shifting limbs against his to nudge him out of dreams whenever his face started to cloud into nightmares.

After the next funeral, she risked the crowds and work crews and slipped out of their safehouse, heading for Stark's Tower and finding Pepper Potts. 

"I need a ride to Switzerland, and for S.H.I.E.L.D. not to know where we went for a while," she said.

Pepper was all elegant suits and tired eyes, but she'd just taken it in stride. She promised to talk to Tony about keeping it secure, and to have a car ready to pick them up and take them to the runway. There weren't many things Natasha would trust Stark to do unsupervised, but keep a secret from Fury he could manage.

When she told Clint they were leaving, he'd started to refuse, and she didn't let him. She defused his argument with one sentence. "I need to be away from here." Clint didn't believe it was really for her, but it was a lie he could let stand.

Natasha thought it might be closer to the truth than Clint realized. He never asked where they were going, just let her pack him into the car and onto a private plane that winged them away from a city they'd both saved and helped destroy.  
***

Whatever hazards their line of work ran into, or tiny hole in the wall hideouts they'd had to suffer through living in for the sake of an assignment, the pay wasn't anything to scoff at. Natasha didn't need all of Stark's endless tiny gadgets and high tech toys, but she liked the little luxuries of life, when she had the time to enjoy them. She liked warm beaches and soft blue skies. She liked big beds and high threadcount sheets and the gleam of things that were new and fine. 

Clint was simpler. He didn't need five star restaurants or bedding that felt slick against his skin when he moved. But he didn't like sand that always got into his eyes, or hot sun. Natasha split the difference and took them to a private rental in Verbier. It sat atop a hill, and you could see for miles. The snow was so deep that the only way in was the single plowed road that led to their driveway, or the snow mobiles tucked away in the garage. The top floor was the master suite, and through the frosted windows you could see every approach. Expensive enough to suit her tastes, cold and isolated enough to suit his - it worked well enough.

They spent the first day establishing security perimeters, adding to the camera security system by identifying blind spots. The second day they took the rented car into town and bought up enough food to last through a winter, and packed it all away in the vast, modern kitchen. They barely spoke, and the silence was familiar and comfortable. They'd set up enough safehouses and fallbacks over the years. It felt like work, and work came easily to them.

Natasha had never needed as much sleep as other people (normal people), but she spent those first nights in the broad master bed with Clint. They began each night on opposite sides, and would gravitate toward one another when he jerked awake from nightmares, or she stared too long out at the falling snow until she began to feel snow-blind.

The snow piled up and the plows didn't come every day, leaving them isolated in a luxury villa with nothing to do except be alive. The Director called only once, on the untraceable phone Stark had handed her on the airstrip without a word or a wisecrack, and asked if they were safe. When her only answer was _yes_ , he let it stand. She spent the third day curled into a chair, watching a Spanish soap opera on a Swiss network and drinking mint tea while Clint prowled restlessly around the pool table, or made endless clattering beeps with the old fashioned ping-pong table tucked in the corner of the game room. 

When it started to get dark, he brought a blanket that smelled of lavender from one of the downstairs cupboards and draped it around her shoulders, crowding into the chair beside her when she shifted to give him room and tacit permission. "You hate the cold," he said.

"You don't," she answered. He didn't respond, but he _felt_ guilty, and she turned her head, gave him a wry smile. "There's an indoor spa, a heated pool, and a tub big enough to drown in. I'm good."

"At least you have some priorities," Clint said. His arms slid around her and she turned, their positions shifting until she was tucked against his chest and his hand curved over her stomach. "You didn't have to, Tasha."

"I know," she said. She traced her fingers over the top of his. Their hands did the same things, with different weapons. They shot, they killed. But his held calluses that her skin always healed away and kept smooth and soft, no matter what she did. No matter if she'd spent a summer pretending to be a stripper with hands tight around a pole, or a gymnast with a bar she twisted round and round, her hands stayed the same. (It hadn't been pretending. She'd been those things, those things just hadn't been real, but years away from them, the differences felt strangely insubstantial to Natasha. She'd become used to playing roles instead of becoming them in the years between then and now.) "I don't hate it," she said. "It just reminds me of home. When I was a little girl."

He stilled beneath her, and she shut her eyes, sinking into the beat of his heart. "Before?" he finally asked.

She knew what he meant. "Before everything. I remember it all. I didn't used to, but now I do."

He was quiet for a long moment, and Natasha let him stay silent, just waiting. "Do you wish that you didn't remember?" he finally asked.

No and yes. There was no easy answer, and more than the easy single word responses gave away so much. Natasha took a deep breath, the rise and fall of her chest in synch with his, and answered anyway. "I used to. Sometimes I still do. I miss things I never was, people I never knew the names of. Everything I've done is in my head, but nowhere else. There's no more records, no more Soviet Union, no more anything, and if I could forget too, then it would be like it never happened. Just a page out of a storybook that might be a lie, and would have happened to another woman, someone older than me. Someone with scars." She turned her smooth hand over against his. "But if I remember, then it's never forgotten, either. Most of the time, it's better to know that than to imagine who I'd be if I didn't have to remember."

His fingers trailed through her hair. She tipped her head back to look up at him, his face shadowed and too-blank from this angle. "You liked blondes," she said, just for something to say.

He smiled. "Not really. Red is good."

She sat up, twisting to face him instead, draped across his lap and wound in close, his body warm against hers, the blanket pulled taut around them. "My name was Natalia, before you knew me. I wasn't Natasha."

Clint tugged at a loose strand of hair. "I know."

"Natasha is my real name now," she said. He nodded, and she unwrapped the blanket, sliding to her feet and offering him a hand up. "It wasn't your fault. But you'll never forget. Eventually, you won't want to. It will just be part of who you are."

Clint swallowed, let her pull him to his feet. "What if I don't like who that is?"

"It won't matter. I do. I will," Natasha said. "We are who we are. But you're not alone." She backed away a swaying half step toward the stereo tucked into the corner. "I want to teach you to dance," Natasha told him.

"What makes you think I don't already know how?" Clint asked, and then laughed at her lifted eyebrow, the first honest laugh she'd heard since Loki touched him and took him away and she half killed him to bring him back. "Do I get to teach you how to shoot pool?"

"What makes _you_ think I don't already know how to do that, too?" Natasha asked him. 

He grinned. "You know how to do everything. Tell you what, beat me in a round and you can teach me to dance anyway you want."

She kept her hand in his as they walked toward the game room. "Deal. You know I was a pole dancer once, right? That stair railing could double as a pole."

Clint blinked and then sighed. "I'm shutting off the security cams in that room first."

Natasha laughed, picked up a cue as he racked the balls. She let him break. She still won. He didn't expect any other outcome.

She taught him to waltz, playing music over the house's sound system so it drifted through every room, filling up the empty spaces with soft, melodic sound. Between rooms, she kissed him in doorways, and spun in and out of his arms, and she realized she'd never just danced for the hell of it, while she was herself. 

When they made it to the kitchen, he made them dinner while she chopped greens for a salad. Natasha asked him when he'd last seen his brother, where he was living, and who the first girl he'd ever kissed had been.

Over dinner, she picked at the pasta he'd fixed. "We could go see him, before we go back on active duty. Your brother. If you want." _I'll go with you. I'll be part of your life away from work,_ she offered without words, and it felt tense and strange to offer, but a little freeing, too. Exhilarating in a way she'd forgotten she knew how to feel.

He stopped mid bite, looking at her, and when he smiled, the shadows around his eyes lightened, just a little. "Yeah. That could be good. He's a jackass, but yeah."

"I can deal with jackasses. Years of practice," Natasha said.  
***

They left dishes in the sink and a mess on the counter and fell into bed without an inch of distance between them. Natasha kissed the slow-fading bruises on his back and sucked a new one to the surface of skin where his collarbone dipped into shoulder. It wasn't the first time, or the dozenth. They'd been alone in places where enemies outnumbered friends and the chances of coming home ebbed ever-lower so many times that they both knew how to take comfort and distraction where it offered, and when there was no place for either.

But there were no enemies lurking outside their door, just ghosts in their memories and the warmth between them to cut through the cold. Natasha relearned the shape of Clint's body, the smell of his skin and the bitter-salt taste of him on her tongue. She watched the flutter of his lashes and let his fingers and tongue twist inside her until she came, silent and shuddering. When she came down, she pushed him to his back and he watched as she rolled her hips slow and lazy and rode him until his voice broke and he was begging without words, just broken sounds of need.

Later they lay together in a spent pile, her leg over his and her head on his shoulder. Clint had been quiet for so long that she thought he was about to drift off to sleep when he spoke, voice still hoarse, but not at all groggy. "How did you know it was safe to let me go?"

Natasha didn't move, didn't look at him, just let her eyes stare up at the darkened ceiling. "I didn't."

He took that in, hand sliding along her hip. "How do you know it's not still there, waiting?"

"I don't," Natasha said, more honest than she wanted to be. There were no platitudes built for this, but there were easier things to say than the truth. For once, she just spoke without weighing the cost of each word. "But if it were, I'd stop you, and I'd bring you back again."

Clint made a low sound, and he didn't ask _why_ , but Natasha heard it as clearly as if he had. "No one is going to take you from me," Natasha told him quietly.

"When I was young-" She heard his snort and elbowed him lightly into silence, continuing, "really young. The first time I was young, there were other girls in training. I was the most promising. They took me to the Red Room, and they trained me. One of my trainers, he was like me. Like what they made me. More than human, less than human - whatever you want to call it. We had the same serum in our veins. It's not like Rogers, but it's enough that we heal, that we don't age, that they could reset what they put in our heads every time."

Even now when she'd carved out her space to stand in and learned every inch of her own past, there were parts that felt hazy, and this one most of all because they'd worked so hard to bury it. But Natasha pulled it up, the outline of his face, the endless targets and training of the Red Rooms, the gravel roughness of his voice. "He had no name that I knew at first. They kept him suspended between missions, but they let him train me. I was just a girl - a kid. He was the best they'd ever had. He didn't remember anything but what they let him know, until the day I kissed him."

Clint was silent against her, and Natasha wasn't looking at him. "I loved him, and they took him from me along with everything else. I didn't even know to miss him."

She turned finally, searching his face. "No one will ever _take_ someone from me like that again. If we walk away, it's because we choose to. If we come back, it's because that's what we want. Loki stole you. He doesn't get to keep you."

Clint looked at her, and his fingers slid up to cup her chin. "But you do?"

Natasha shook her head. "No. You do. But where I go, you're invited." She didn't own him. He didn't own her. They chose S.H.I.E.L.D., they chose their life and their battles. They could choose each other, too.

He leaned in, mouth soft against hers for a kiss that was almost too light to feel, just a sharing of space and breath and proximity. "I'll follow you, Tasha." Clint leaned away, feigning a leer. "I like the view."

She snorted, curling back up against him as he lay back. There was a bow under the bed, a gun under her pillow, a knife in the nightstand. Natasha didn't remember ever feeling this at home. "Pervert."

He smiled, played with her hair as she watched out the window with half closed eyes. "What was his name?" he asked. 

"James," Natasha said. "It's all he remembered to tell me."

"I'm sorry."

Natasha thought of James' face, the cool metal of his arm and the way she'd felt when she was with him. She'd forgotten his face, his name, what they'd spoken of - everything, until years later. But she could remember how it had felt, now. Natasha thought some hidden part of her had always remembered, and maybe that was why she'd woken up, and why she could feel like this again, when she let herself. 

"I'm not," she said. Everything had led her to who she was now, and she was at peace with that. James was long gone, but she was here, and so was Clint. It was something.  
***

Clint shook awake from dreams less often as the days passed, and Natasha took to getting up with him when he did instead. They played cards sitting cross-legged on the bed (Natasha always won), or chess over the table in the parlor (Clint usually won), or shot pool (it was about even). 

Some nights they talked about nothing - food and bad TV and overrated novels.

Some nights they talked about everything else, and then had sex against the shower wall, in the hot tub, or back in the soft welcome of their rented bed. The sex never erased the talking, the new parts of Natasha that asked about Clint's past, or the fragile parts of Clint that spoke of a future where he wasn't forever waiting for Loki to pull his strings again, but it made it easier to stand, somehow.

Two and a half weeks in, Fury called again, and they both just stared at the phone and let it ring until Natasha finally picked it up to answer a second before the ring ended. "Is he ready to come back in? We have a developing situation," Fury said.

"Developing how fast?" Natasha asked, watching as Clint dug through the freezer, the set of his shoulders giving away how closely he was listening, even if his expression didn't.

"Fast enough." There was a long pause and then the Director's voice came again, careful in a way that even across a phone line, Natasha could interpret as _concerned_ , not _cautious_. "Agent Romanoff, if this has gone beyond your abilities to-"

"It hasn't. He's fine. He'll be fine. But if the world isn't ending, I'm not ready to come back in. I think we earned a month off, Director Fury," Natasha broke in. 

From the freezer, Clint's mouth turned up in a smile, and the Director gave a slow sigh into the phone. "You two better come back bright eyed and bushy tailed, Natasha. And check your email. There's something you need to be aware of before you come back in."

"Understood," Natasha said, and hung up.

"Time to suit up?" Clint asked lightly. "Off to play superhero, or are we back to doing what we do best?" 

"Neither. We have a month. The world isn't ending," Natasha reached for him, pulling him in close and running her hands along the solid muscle of his arms. "After that - whatever we need to do, I guess." She'd figure that out when they went back.

"Thank you," he said, mouth against her jaw.

"It's not just for you," she told him. His eyes were clear when they met hers, and Natasha let herself believe they would stay that way. "I'm getting used to the snow." She pushed him lightly back toward the freezer. "Next year, a beach though. You can suck it up."

Next year. The year after that. They were killers and always would be, but they could keep each other human, too.

~~


End file.
